Chuck Your Phone in the Toilet, Because Superhydrophobic Sprays Are Now Affordable

ShamWow! is amateur stuff compared to superhydrophobic coating, but you already knew that. Superhydrophobic sprays have yielded infomercial gold since company Ultra Ever Dry put a video on Youtube this past January.

The product, a coating that uses nanotechnology to totally repel water, has a commercial that has received 2+ million views online, but the several hundred dollar price tag made the product a fun science experiment to watch rather than a product to buy. This is no longer the case thanks to NeverWet, a near-identical product that can now be found at stores like Home Depot for twenty bucks.

We've as yet got no idea if it works, as we've yet to try it. The reviews for Ultra EverDry haven't been great: one guy on Amazon said the product failed, but he also didn't use the required spray bottle, while others also found trouble. NeverWet is certainly cheaper, and doesn't require a special spray bottle, so it's less of a risk to try. Plus, the reviews at Home Depot's site are more positive.

NeverWet partnered with company Rust-Oleum to steal mimic the innovation popularized by Ultra Ever Dry and add some competition to the anti-liquid kitchen appliance game. Patents are still pending, but NeverWet's YouTube advert is making the internet rounds, with 500k views in under a week.

Superhyrdophobic spray is made of silicon and rejects liquids by creating high contact angles on surfaces so liquids simply slide off them. Car wax and Teflon produce about half the angle of NeverWet, which sets at roughly 175 degrees. The company even brags that they submerged NeverWet-covered objects in salt water for over a year and they still came out totally dry. This is perfect for nervous individuals like myself who can't help but topple glasses of wine on their white shirts during first dates.

The videos demonstrate their products uses with pragmatic examples such as shoes, toilet scrubbers and cookie sheets, but Motherboard brainstormed a few untraditional uses of the product that are yet to be popularized online:

- Cats and other water-shy animals

- Umbrellas

- Trashbags 

- Laptops (!)

- The Wicked Witch of the West

- Bowls and bongs (now you can smoke outside in the rain)

- Socks

- Your child's body while he learns to swim

- Bruce Willis in Unbreakable

And here are some objects that should not be coated in superhydrophobic spray:

- Condoms

- Contact lens

- Goldfish

- Aquaman

Check out the NeverWet video campaign below. Our gadgets now have a chance of lasting more than a year.